How Can Donald Trump Protect America When ... ?

I was going to do a post on the above photo—a screenshot from the documentary series “Dirty Money,” currently streaming on Netflix, and much recommended—and do it in the vein of: What if this were a Democrat? What if this were Obama with one of his daughters? How often would we have seen the image on Fox News? How stridently would his masculinity have been ridiculed? “He's not man enough to protect his own daughter, and you expect him to protect America?!?” It would be a cultural touchstone. The mainstream press would be forced to weigh in. Op-Eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. Jokes on SNL. On and on. It would never go away.

But because it's Trump, it never arrived.

I was going to do all that, as I said, but why? Trump can do no right and it doesn't matter. The stink on him is overwhelming and Fox News calls it perfume. They and he play “Whoever smelt it, dealt it” and point fingers at the FBI, the intelligence community, John McCain and other lifelong Republicans. Any institution they once backed and saluted, they dump if there's a chance it might bring down this horror show of a man, this bullying liar, this lazy, ignorant embarassment to the office and the country and the world and the human race.

Who is that, by the way, violating Ivanka Trump's personal airspace right in front of her supposedly powerful father? It‘s Tevfik Arif, the Kazakhstan-born founder of the Bayrock Group, who, according to the documentary, “was associated with some of Kazakhstan’s more notorious oligarchs, who were known as being unbelievably corrupt.” According to this New York Times article, Bayrock had an office on “the 24th floor of Trump Tower, where they began work on the future Trump SoHo and used their connections to explore a possible Trump building in Moscow.” In 2010, they were all sued by 15 Trump SoHo buyers who said they'd been told 30-60 percent of the units had been sold when the building was nearly deserted: just 15 perecent of the units sold. That same year, Arif was arrested in Turkey and charged with human sex trafficking.

That's who that guy is.

OK, I‘ll say it: How can Donald Trump protect America when he can’t even protect his own daughter?